GNOME's Shotwell 0.30 Is Organizing Flatpak Support, Theme Changes, Facial Recognition

Those working on GNOME's Shotwell image/photo manager and organizer are baking a number of improvements and new features for the next release.

Next on deck for Shotwell is v0.30. With Shotwell 0.30 there is more work on properly supporting Flatpak for distributing the app and sandboxing. There has been some out-of-tree work on supporting Shotwell in Ubuntu's Snap form, but currently it isn't mainlined and not even building correctly.

Shotwell 0.30 also is adding a dark theme variant while the light theme continues to be available. This next image organizer update also has a reworked extended information panel for showing the image details and support for facial detection was re-merged to mainline. Right now though this facial recognition support is disabled by default due to user experience issues but can be easily enabled when building the program from source.

On the unfortunate side, the Facebook integration is likely to break beginning in August due to Facebook API changes and there isn't yet a fix in place for using the updated API.

More details on the upcoming Shotwell 0.30 release for GNOME 3.30 can be found via this blog post by GNOME developer Jens Georg.